German-American Discourse on Politics and Culture

October 31, 2004

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung has an interesting article by Professor Horst Müller of the Hochschule Mittweida that is highly critical of the German press in its handling of the Iraq prison abuse scandal. "How could it happen," Müller writes, "that US forces could torture prisoners for an entire year without one major German newspaper or media outlet reporting about it?" Finding out the answer to this question became a student project at Mittweida.

The students interviewed the editors at the major publications and received familiar answers: "Not enough evidence", "Denials of the US military command", or "Not enough concrete information." Most telling was the response by Spiegel chief editor Stefan Aust :"If only we had gotten the photos..."

Particularly damning, in the view of Prof. Müller, is that human rights organizations such as Amnesty International were reporting eyewitness accounts of prison abuse as early as July 2003.

But the world was not to learn about the scandalous treatment of prisoners until digital photos were leaked to CBS news in April 2004.

Prof. Müller and his students have compiled their findings in a book: Folter frei - Abu Ghraib in den Medien. And more information can be found on the Web site: www.folterfrei.de

As bad as this looks for the German press, it is ten times worse for the press in the US. Many "embedded" reporters witnessed acts of abuse and torture and did not report these since they did not want to risk their position with the coalition units. The sorry performance of the US press in the coverage of the Iraq war (and the run-up to the war) will be written about by media historians for many years.

Meanwhile hundreds of detainees continue to be held in Guantanamo, Those that have been released have spoken about two years of abuse at the hands of the US military. Why doesn't this get more prominent play in the US press? No photographs....

I received the following message from a female student in the US in connection with a post about the neo-Nazi's recent success in eastern Germany.

Dear David,

I'm a 26 yeard old student living in Boston, Ma. and I follow German politics
closely and I found your site to be very interesting. However, I disagree
strongly with your disparaging comments about the NPD. The NPD voters are not
"dumb", they are incredibly educated and more importantly, their instinct is
right on the mark. Non-white immigration into Germany has been an unmitigated
failure much like here in the U.S. It's a shame that our liberal arrogance and
hubris prevents us whites from seeing the intrinsic danger and thilth multiracial
societies bring. It's almost as if we've watched too much "white guilt" TV
programs, seen too many "Roots" TV specials, or attended one too many
"diversity" training sessions. And in so doing, we've become noticably numb to the grand
suffering multiracialism/forced "diversity have brought us.

I feel bad for the German mother whose daughter has been raped by a Turk. I
feel anguish at the daily reports of white students being stabbed, beaten and
robbed by blacks here in Boston everyday. I shudder at the horror of the FBI's
Uniform Crime stats which unequivocably show that blacks commit violent crime
at a rate 15 to 20 times that of whites. This stat takes Socio Economic Status
(SES) into account as well.

Anyway David, I hope that you will be more open minded towards the students,
skinheads, elderly folk, etc., who have voted for the NPD. Their choice was a
brave and intelligent one.

October 29, 2004

The transatlantic rift between Germany and the United States is deep and cannot be glossed over by glib appeals to 'universal values' or 'common interests.' Even though the rift was caused by the Bush administration's inept diplomacy and doctrine of preemptive war, the fissure cannot be overcome simply by electing a new president on November 2. This week the bad feelings were even extended into cyberspace when the official Web site of t George W. Bush denied access to European visitors. As noted in Telepolis:

Richard Berstein has a piece in today's New York Times about Europe and the United States that examines the rift and speculates on how the US election will effect But no matter what the outcome is, it is clear that both sides will have to change their approach:

"The animating idea here is that whoever is elected, the future of the world depends on a continuation of healthy relations between America and Europe and a common appreciation of the bedrock values of their alliance. To effect a reconciliation, the thinking goes, European leaders have to show a willingness to take some political risk, while the United States has to stop seeing the development of Europe as a threat to its interests."

Berstein quotes Die Zeit editor Michael Naumann's prescription for restoring the alliance, which is very much centered on Iraq and a possible German military participation. Naumann has four conditions:

"Europe will come to the aid of the United States in Iraq if the United States can fulfill four conditions:

¶That in the aftermath of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, it reaffirms its commitment to the Geneva Convention's rules on the treatment of prisoners.

¶That it recommits itself to nuclear nonproliferation at home, reducing its own weapons stockpiles and not just preventing countries like North Korea and Iran from obtaining them.

¶That it enters into serious ecological discussions, including the Kyoto treaty on global warming, which was rejected by the Bush administration.

¶That there be what Mr. Naumann calls "a return to a less arrogant tone of conversation," meaning that leaders on both sides of the Atlantic need to desist from the demagogic posturing of past months.

This last point presumably means there should be no warnings about "countries like France" from the president of the United States, and no talk of a "multipolar world" - code meaning that American power is a danger and needs to be contained - from the president of France.

In return, France and Germany have to find a way to help the country that saved Europe in two hot wars and one cold one in the last century and that now finds itself militarily and diplomatically isolated in a violent conflict in Iraq.

One way, proposed by Mr. Naumann, would be to get serious about the long-proposed but still mostly unbuilt European military rapid reaction force and to deploy some of its detachments to places like Falluja and Sadr City."

In the original Zeit editorial, Naumann warns that Germany must resist the temptation to respond to US hegemonist behavior with "preemptive abstinence."

If anyone needed further evidence of how four years of the 'Bush Doctrine' have poisoned the relations between US and Germany, they only have to look at the acrimony surrounding General Motor's plan to shift production from its German facilities to Poland. Last week the Opel workers in Bochum ended their wildcat strike, but that did not end the dispute. If anything, the tone has become even more bitter and the anger at GM has now taken on a stridently political tone that is directed at Bush's foreign policy. Mark Landler has an article in the New York Times, "Resentment Toward G.M. Is Growing in Germany".

"Is General Motors jilting Germany for Poland because of the war in Iraq?

A German politician suggested as much last week, saying in a radio interview that G.M.'s Opel division had shifted some auto production from its plants in Germany to a factory in Gliwice, Poland, to reward the Polish government for its support of the Bush administration.

G.M. dismisses political motives, noting that Poland's far lower labor costs give it a compelling economic incentive to move. But this is only one of several brickbats General Motors has had to absorb in the 11 days since it announced that it would cut up to 12,000 jobs in Europe, the majority in Germany."

General Motors may have perfectly legitimate business reason to scale back Opel production in Germany, but the unbelievably incompent and arroagant way this restructuring has been been carried out parallels the aggressive 'unilateralism' of the Bush administration.

"Rather than thrashing out its cuts in advance with Opel's union and workers' councils, as is the custom in German companies, G.M. announced them directly to the employees and the news media.

The company further rankled workers by not dispatching an executive to the Opel factory in Bochum to explain its decision. The factory, in the economically depressed Ruhr Valley, is viewed as the most likely to be shut down. Workers there staged a six-day strike to protest the cuts.

"I don't think they know anything about Europe, otherwise they would have done things completely differently," said Ferdinand Dudenhöffer , director of the Center for Automotive Research in Gelsenkirchen. "I've never seen such lousy communication at such a difficult moment."

Now the German workers at Opel have signaled that they are prepared to strike if GM doesn't consider an alternate proposal that would preserve jobs and plant capacity in Germany. Separately, the Netzeitungreports that several Opel employees are considering filing a 'multi-billion' dollar lawsuit against GM, charging that it systematically 'plundered' the company's resources over many years:

Politics and business eventully intersect. It is apparent that repairing the rift that has developed between Germany and the US of the past four years will require a concerted effort not just from politicians, but also business leaders.

October 27, 2004

The Bush reelection campaign must be ecstatic today. After failing to secure the endorsement of the two most prominent US newspapers - the New York Times and the Washington Post - Bush got the strong endorsement from the German newspaper with the largest national circulation: the sleazy tabloid Bildzeitung. Hugo Müller-Vogg lists10 reasons why Bush should be reelected. Some of the reasons are what you would expect: resolute action to fight Islamic terrorism, support for free trade which helps Germany's exports to the US. But a couple of reasons are just simply bizarre: Bush knows the Europeans do not have the capacity to support international military interventions.

In other words, Kerry's multilateral approach to international crises would hurt Germany! Also strange is the comment that Kerry is simply less prepared than any other presidential candidate to assume office. What qualifications did Bush have when he ran in 2000?

The good folks at the BILDblog, who monitor the activities of Germany's most notorious tabloid, ask the question: "Who is this endorsement aimed at?" Maybe the 200,000 Americans living in Germany. BILDbLog is a is also amused that one reason put forward by Bild in its endorsement is that with Bush "America will continue to bear the financial and human (Blutzoll) burden for fighting the war on terror. In other words, it's better that Amis die than Germans.

Spiegel-Online also wrote about the Bild endorsement, noting that such endorsements are extremely rare in Germany, even though every community newspaper in the United States publishes endorsements for every political office. The speculation is that Bild is setting the tone for the German national election in 2006.

UPDATE: In an earlier posting we wrote about the Jewish vote in the US and how it was no longer monolithic. Today the Washington Post has a good follow up article on "The End of the 'Jewish Vote'". The thrust of the article is that Jews are as divided as the rest of the country, with the Orthodox religious vote aligned with Bush and his evangelical Christian base, and the liberal, or secular Jews voting democratic. This development is somewhat strange, given the strong anti-Semitic undercurrent in much evangelical literature.

October 25, 2004

The German press is beginning to take seriously the possibility of a Kerry victory on November 2, and so the question comes up: what would change in the US alliance with Germany? We have already noted that in Germany Kerry is preferred over George W. Bush by a large margin. But would a Kerry presidency actually improve US-German relations, which have been damaged by the US-led Iraq invasion? Today ZDF-Onlineposed this question to Karsten Voigt, Coordinator of US-German Relations for the Schröder administration. Of course, Voigt has to be very diplomatic in his answers, since no matter who wins on November 2 his office will have to work with him. But he sounds a note of caution with respect to John Kerry's oft-cited commitment to 'multilateralism', noting that 'actions speak louder than words'.

But in general Voigt doesn't see major differences between Bush and Kerry in their approach to foreign policy.

Voigt is certainly incorrect in this, since the outline of a Kerry Germany policy is already visible. For one thing, Kerry has been extremely critical of Bush's plan to withdraw most of the 70,000 US troops from Germany. Undoubtedly that plan would be postponed and/or scaled-back if Kerry wins the presidency. A Kerry presidency would certainly revitalize the US commitment to NATO (one can imagine General Wesley Clark playing a role in a Kerry administration). This would pretty much eliminate the need for a special EU military force. And, while Voigt rejects the idea that Kerry would convince Germany to commit combat troops to Iraq, there are certainly indications that others in Berlin would be more receptive to Kerry's approach on Iraq. A President Kerry would also support US retification of the Kyoto Treaty on global climate change, which even Russia will now sign.

But others are alarmed by John Kerry's campaign rhetoric. In a column in today's Financial Times Deutschland("Breaking with the Founding Fathers") Thomas Klau is particularly disturbed by something Kerry said in the first presidential debate and then has repeated several time since: "I will hunt down and kill the terrorists wherever they are." Klau sees this statement as showing contempt for the international rule of law, but also as a betrayal of the values of the US Constitution:

October 23, 2004

There are more than 200,000 Americans living in Germany. In a tight election, their votes could make a difference. Spiegel-Online has a new English language service that reviews the daily headlines and has a blurb on the difficullties Americans have in Germany as they try to register in time for the US presidential election:

"Less than two weeks before the Nov. 2 presidential elections in the United States, US voter groups in Germany are reporting considerable voting problems. "Many Americans still haven't received their absentee ballots," said Elsa Rassbach of the independent group American Voices Abroad. The reason? Election offices in US states have been flooded with registration requests from Americans living abroad and have been unable to keep up with demand. That's creating considerable problems given that most states required absentee voters to mail their ballots by Wednesday."

In a follow-up article today, Spiegel reports on the difficulties Americans abroad have in trying to register via the official US Web site. Since the site is under control of the US Department of Defense, there has been much discussion of a republican conspiracy to block potential democratic voters:

The 70,000 US military members in Germany, on the other hand, have an easy time in completing their voter registration. It turns out that 71% of them favor Bush. Hmmm....

Coverage of the US election campaign has reached a fever pitch in Germany, and bloggers are very much in evidence. Alexander Svensson has a good overview of the blogs and their technical pros and cons in his blog Wortfeld. Besides the campaign blog at Tagesschau that we have noted in previous posts, Svensson mentions Wolfgang Harrer, who blogs the campaign for Deutsche Welle and Michael Backfisch, whose Wahlbeobachter blogs for the Handelsblatt. Backfisch's most recent post is a scathing critique of President Bush's constant use of fear as a propaganda tool.

October 21, 2004

The Jewish community in Germany is one of the fastest growing anywhere. Germany ranks third behind the US and Israel as a destination for Jewish emigrants. The Netzeitung has an interesting special series on Jews living in Germany. The articles cover a range of topics including the awarding of the Leo Baeck Prize to Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, the reaction of the Jewish community to the political success of the neo-Nazis, and the role of 'mixed-heritage' (Mischlinge)Jewish soldiers in Hitler's Wehrmacht. There is also a review of Amos Elon's book Zu einer anderen Zeit: Porträt der jüdisch-deutschen Epoche (1743-1933), a history of the 'golden age' of Jewish-German culture, which wasn't always so golden. The book was published in English as The Pity of it All.

The Jewish community in Germany is still too small (compared, for example, to the Turkish community) to be much of a political factor. In the US, however, the Jewish vote carries more weight than the absolute numbers (2% of the US electorate) would seem to warrant. How will they vote in the US presidential election? Junge Welt has an article on the Myth of the "Jewish Vote" in the US.. The author refutes the notion that American Jews are influenced by the right-wing pro-Israel lobby AIPAC. The vast majority of Jewish voters certainly support a strong Israel, but vote for democratic-liberal causes:

This analysis is probably correct . The Washington Postreports that Jewish voters are trending towards John Kerry due to President Bush's mishandling of the Iraq war, even though concerns about terror are giving Bush slightly more support than he had in 2000.

October 20, 2004

American workers have become accustomed to their employers shutting down manufacturing capacity in the US as they set up operations in low-wage locations. Now this 'race to the bottom' has hit Germany in a very visible way. After years of mismanagement that resulted in poor-quality automobiles and red ink, General Motors announced massive layoffs at its German Opel facilities. Mark Landler at the New York Times reports:

"G.M., which owns Opel, has begun negotiations with union representatives at all its European plants over a cost-cutting plan that is aimed at saving 500 million euros ($623 million) a year in labor costs, and could result in a reduction of up to 12,000 jobs, most in Germany.

In Bochum, a gritty industrial city in the Ruhr Valley, workers are demanding that G.M. guarantee it will not lay off workers or shut the factory. The plant, which employs 10,000, is considered particularly vulnerable as G.M. weighs moving production to lower-cost sites in Eastern Europe."

But then somthing interesting happened. Unlike workers in the US who meekly receive their pink slips and then apply for low-paying Mcjobs at the local Wal-Mart, the Opel workers decided to take responisiblity for their own future and began a wildcat strike. Such a move is highly unusual in Germany, which for decades has relied on consensus between the trade unions and management to keep worker unrest at bay. And the strike at Opel/Bochum did not have the approval of either IG Metall, the giant union that represents German autoworkers, of the plant Workers' Council (Betriebsrat) that negotiates directly with plant management.

Despite threats of massive reprisals by GM, the workers in Bochum have continued their illegal strike for six days. And there were signs that their action was beginning to produce results. From today'sBoston Globe:

"In a conciliatory sign, Opel said yesterday that it had agreed with employee delegates to try to ensure the survival of its main plants in Germany -- including Bochum -- beyond 2010, while finding "socially acceptable" ways of cutting back the workforce.

Opel said a shortage of parts from Bochum stopped production yesterday at Ruesselsheim and in Antwerp, Belgium. Company spokesman Ulrich Weber said Bochum usually produced about 1,000 cars a day, while Ruesselsheim made nearly 900 and Antwerp around 1,100. "

The situation at Opel has been examined extensively in the German Press. The German economy is higly dependent on automobile production: one out of every seven jobs is in the auto sector. And management has found ways to achieve the same much-admired German productivity and quality in foreign markets.

But does this have to be the long-term fate of Opel production in Germany. Yesterday the strikers were paid a visit by the Betriebsrat of Porsche. Ten years ago Porsche was on the verge of bankruptcy; today Porsche is the most profitable auto-producer in the world.

UPDATE: After the Bochum strike effectively stopped all pruduction in Germany, Belgium, and at the GM plant in Liverpool, the workers agreed to end the strike and gave the Betriebsrat permission to commence negotiations with Opel management

October 18, 2004

German observers of the US political scene are increasingly perplexed by the growing influence of the religious right. As noted earlier, the strident religiosity of President Bush has contributed to his unpopularity in Germany. Germans are astonished that 53% of adult Americans consider themselves fundamentlist Christians who believe in the immanent return of Christ and the inevitability of the apocalypse. 89% of Americans say they believe in Heaven, while 72% believe in Hell and Satan (although only 4% see this as their own fate). 90% believe that evolution is not a proven scientific theory, and that alternative, creationist theories need to be taught in schools as well. Susan Heiman recently wrote about the power of the religious right in Die Zeit and concludes that "the language of faith now dominates politics" in the United States.

Heiman is alarmed by the amazing success of the Left Behind books - a series of 14 novels that depict the Second Coming of Jesus and the ensuing apolcalypse. Over 60 million copies have been sold so far. This is bad news for Europeans, since the Devil appears in these books as a "well-dressed, multi-lingual European" who is trying to create an "empire of evil" - namely the United Nations. THe introduction of the Euro is proof positive that the end is near. Heiman is very disturbed by this emphasis on the destruction of the world as our inevitable fate and quotes a theologian:

If anything, the current political campaign in the United States has only emboldened the religious right. Rainer Sütfeld, blogging the campaign for the Tageschau, describes a dinner with some Jewish friends in New York City, where the conversation turns to emigration in the event of a second Bush administration:

How justified are these fears? In the current New York Times Magazine Ron Suskind has an article on the "faith-based presidency" which should be required reading by all Americans or anyone who wants to understand America under Bush. A government run on faith does not need facts or empirical evidence to justify its policies:

This is one key feature of the faith-based presidency: open dialogue, based on facts, is not seen as something of inherent value. It may, in fact, create doubt, which undercuts faith. It could result in a loss of confidence in the decision-maker and, just as important, by the decision-maker. Nothing could be more vital, whether staying on message with the voters or the terrorists or a California congressman in a meeting about one of the world's most nagging problems. As Bush himself has said any number of times on the campaign trail, ''By remaining resolute and firm and strong, this world will be peaceful.''

The religious right believes that President Bush is doing God's will in the White House. And if God has chosen Bush, that means that Bush's opponents are on the side of Satan. For this reason, it doesn't matter that Bush lost three debates, that the war in Iraq is a disaster, that Bush has created massive fiscal deficits throught gross mismanagement of the economy.

Commenting on the Suskind article in Salon, Michelle Goldberg equates the Bush administration's manipulation of the religious right with a nascent toltalitarian movement. Here she quotes Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism:

"The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error," she wrote. Later, she continued, "The stubbornness with which totalitarian dictators have clung to their original lies in the fact of absurdity is more than superstitious gratitude to what turned the trick,...Once these propaganda slogans are integrated into a 'living organization,' they cannot be safely eliminated without wrecking the whole structure."

The United States, of course, has not gone fascist under Bush, even if it's less free that it was four years ago. But he's not done yet. Besides, in the above quotes, Arendt wasn't writing about totalitarian societies. She was writing about totalitarian movements that were gaining power but had yet to take over. It's important to maintain a sense of proportion when talking about this administration, which, for all its awfulness, is light-years away from Hitlerian. Finishing Suskind's article, though, there's not much reason for those of us in the "reality-based community" to trust that American democracy can survive intact if this man gets another four years to try to bend the world to his illusions.